Placeholder Image

Subtitles section Play video

  • This video was made possible by The Crew 2, a new open-world racing game from Ubisoft.

  • More about that after the video.

  • Time is something that none of us can escape from and all of us around the world live with different times and different schedules.

  • Planning these times and schedules can get complicated when you board a plane or travel some other way between different time zones. Like when you

  • fly between New York City and Los Angeles, where you would have to adjust your clock back 3 hours upon arriving in LA.

  • But some other trips around the world can get way more complicated than that,

  • thanks to how badly we've messed around with the global time zones. In a perfect world,

  • our planet would be divided between 24 equal time zones, each representing one hour of the day. But we don't live in that world.

  • We live in a world where countries,

  • borders and politics exist that have horribly skewed this perfect ideal into something that looks more like this. And here are the most extreme

  • examples of the oddities you can find using this map.

  • Let's start off with Spain, which despite being in the same general longitude as Britain,

  • Ireland and Portugal, remains one hour ahead of those countries.

  • This means that you can fly from London and travel west to Madrid, and still have to move your clock one hour ahead

  • instead of backwards.

  • The reason that's the case is because Francisco Franco said so back in

  • 1940 when he moved Spain's time ahead an hour to be closer to Nazi Germany, and over 70 years later,

  • they've still just decided to never change it back. And speaking of countries that have made questionable decisions regarding their time zones,

  • China is probably the weirdest.

  • Normally, China is large enough to cover five different time zones in the ideal world.

  • But in reality, the Chinese government has decided that all of China is just simply 1 time zone that follows Beijing time.

  • They did this in an attempt to create a sense of national unity across the country.

  • But, it's had the unintended consequence of messing with people's lives in the western part.

  • Imagine for a moment if the United States

  • just declared that the time in Washington DC was now the time across the entire US.

  • This is a pretty similar case and the people in the western parts of China are about 2 hours behind

  • Beijing in real terms. This messes with workers' productivity in the area and it means that if you have a normal 9:00 to 5:00 job,

  • you can either effectively go into work at 7:00 a.m and leave at 3:00 p.m,

  • or you can adjust your schedule, going to work at 11 a.m and work until 7 p.m. A few years ago,

  • Apple randomly switched users' time zones in this area to the unofficial time zones

  • they were using to get by and caused many people to accidentally sleep in for 2 extra hours. And as a final weird

  • consequence of this policy, you can walk across this very tiny border from China into

  • Afghanistan and have to set your clock back a full three and a half

  • hours after crossing, which is a bigger time difference than traveling all the way from Boston to Los Angeles,

  • you can achieve by just walking a few minutes.

  • Next up, is how weird the International Dateline looks in the Pacific. Again in theory,

  • the International Dateline would be a straight line with a 24 hour time difference on either side of it. While the Pacific here is

  • mostly empty, there are a few islands and land chunks that curve the line pretty dramatically in some places.

  • Like here in Samoa, where the government decided to completely skip December 30th,

  • 2011 and move the country forward an entire day. Besides them not liking LeBron and wanting to skip his birthday, the other

  • reason they decided to do that was because way back in

  • 1892, the Samoan king moved the country east of the Dateline in order to be closer

  • connected to the US, but over a 100 years since then, Samoa's economy grew closer to Australia and New Zealand

  • instead, despite being 21 hours ahead in time from Sydney. So in 2011, they changed it back to how things were before

  • 1892. But this created another awkward

  • situation in neighboring American Samoa, just 70 kilometers away which stuck with being east of the Dateline, which makes a

  • 24 hour time difference between them and a 25 hour time difference in the summer.

  • But even weirder is this monstrosity in Kiribas, where the date line lunges out

  • 2,000 miles to surround it, before coming back to

  • relatively normal. This

  • situation means that you could start in Hawaii on a Monday, travel south, and end up in Tuesday

  • and if you kept going south, you'd end up back in Monday.

  • This also means that at some point

  • every day, there exist 3 days going on at the same time in different parts of the world. When it's 6:30 a.m

  • in New York on Saturday, its 11:30 p.m in American Samoa on Friday, and it's 12:30 a.m

  • in Christmas Island, Kiribas on Sunday.

  • But perhaps the weirdest timezone change you can ever experience is right here in the United States. The US

  • is mostly pretty straightforward with 4 time zones that cover the continental 48 states and one each for Hawaii and Alaska.

  • But daylight savings time is where things get complicated. Two states don't follow daylight savings time.

  • Hawaii, which doesn't matter because it's surrounded by ocean and Arizona which is weird because it's surrounded by land. But Arizona gets even more weird,

  • when you consider the borders of the Navajo reservation, which does follow daylight savings time.

  • This is even further complicated by the Hopi reservation

  • which is totally surrounded by the Navajo reservation and like the rest of Arizona, decides to not follow daylight savings time.

  • But the Navajo Reservation has an enclave inside of the Hopi reservation

  • which creates a time zone map of Arizona during daylight savings time that looks like this. In

  • theory, you could drive in a straight line and hit all of these spots and have to change your clock an hour back and forth

  • 7 times all while driving,

  • inside of the same state. And while road trips like this one can be a lot of fun,

  • you may want to test out driving in a game first, like The Crew 2, which is entirely open-world meaning they recreated the entire

  • US and you can drive and race through all of it. Not only in cars, but also boats, motorcycles and planes. As

  • somebody who's really passionate about both video games and driving,

  • I really enjoyed playing this and if you're into car games or racing games,

  • I'm sure you will too.

  • If you think you're interested in playing this, there's a link in the description where you can check it out next.

  • Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next week for another new video then.

This video was made possible by The Crew 2, a new open-world racing game from Ubisoft.

Subtitles and vocabulary

Click the word to look it up Click the word to find further inforamtion about it